


Postscript to an Epilogue

by Solshine



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Alcoholism, F/M, katniss is not a good mother, maritial problems, post-epilogue, this is the opposite of a fix it fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-22
Updated: 2016-07-22
Packaged: 2018-07-26 02:57:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7557403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solshine/pseuds/Solshine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To the children's eyes, their mother has always been broken, their father has always been sad. Sometimes it's possible to have lost too much to salvage a happily ever after from the wreckage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Postscript to an Epilogue

**Author's Note:**

> Honestly, if Katniss is a good mother and a happy wife after all of that, I'm the queen of England.

The children don’t call him “Uncle Haymitch” or anything like that. He’s just Haymitch, the neighbor who owns the flock of geese that roam the village and terrorize all the kids. Haymitch is a favorite of the two Mellark children when he’s gooseherding, listening to them and telling them stories. He sits in the sun, and his hands tremble, but he smiles for them. He teaches them alone not to fear the hissing geese, so that when the birds interrupt neighborhood games it is the Mellarks who chase them off, hissing right back.

Days when he is not gooseherding, when the geese go free eating what they can and chasing who they will, the Mellark children do not play with Haymitch. Their father tells them that Haymitch is sick today, so they play with the other children, or each other, or their father, or sometimes with their mother. But their mother is tired a lot, so mostly she just watches. 

Once when someone is visiting the village from another district, and they ask who Haymitch is, the children answer that he is Mama’s friend. Surely he is the children’s friend too, says Peeta when he hears. And he is Daddy’s friend?

Yes, say the children. But mostly he is Mama’s friend, isn’t he? Peeta does not argue or ask them why they think so.

On days when Haymitch is not gooseherding, the children do not play with him. But he does come over sometimes, after the children go to bed, as Peeta sits with them and reads them bedtime stories.

“Can we say hello to Haymitch?” says the boy.

“No,” says Peeta. “Haymitch and Mama are having grown-up time.”

“Why aren’t you having grown-up time with them?” says the girl. Peeta smiles. Sadly, a little, but the children don’t notice. Their father's smile has always been a little sad.

“I was never much good at grown-up time,” says Peeta. “I’d much rather be here with you.”

He reads to them, and behind his low, fatherly voice they hear the distant murmur from the kitchen of Katniss and Haymitch’s voices, quiet and infrequent between the clink of glasses.

 

\-----

 

The children love the book when they are young; it has their father's drawings in it, and their mother's handwriting, and it is very precious and special so touching it is a great honor. And when Katniss is showing them the book, she smiles, and she holds them in her lap, and she is more or less present behind her eyes. But long before they fully realize that everyone in the book is dead, they see that Katniss is very seldom happy the way she is when she is showing the book to them. They try many things to make her happy, and sometimes, when she is watching them play in the meadow, she smiles, she is all right. And Peeta smiles to see her, and he is all right too. Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes it’s as if nothing is wrong, sometimes they all forget that anything is supposed to be wrong.

But it is unreliable and not often and not enough. For a while they ask to be shown the book to get their mother to smile like that. Then, eventually, they stop. Katniss sits in her chair by the window and nurses a drink, and reads the book alone.

 

\-----

 

Both children are old enough to have stopped asking about the book the day Katniss gets the call. She drops the phoned and slides heavily down the wall, shaking violently, staring at the floor, staring through the floor. Her eyes are wide in what might be terror if it wasn’t so blank.

“Hello?” comes the voice from the phone. “Hello? Mrs. Mellark?”

She has not made a sound, and neither have the children, paused in their quiet playing to watch her uncertainly. But it is as though Peeta can sense it anyway, because he comes in from the next room wiping paint from his hands onto his shirt. When he sees her he hurries over and kneels to gather her into his arms. She allows it, like a doll, and goes on staring. 

He cradles the phone in his shoulder and Katniss in his arms, and murmurs alternately to one and the other, while the children watch silently at a distance, their toys forgotten in their hands. 

 

\-----

 

Peeta paints a new picture for the book. Katniss writes a name underneath it—“Gale Hawthorne.”

“He was my friend when I was growing up,” she says to her children. “He used to hunt with me in the woods, back when there was a fence around them. Remember when I told you about the fence?”

They do remember. They are starting to learn about it in school, but in a simple, distant way, not like the stories Katniss has told about stealth and caution and the peaceful silence of forbidden trees. She has told them about hunting and starving. She has not told them about Gale Hawthorne.

“Tell us about him,” says the girl.

Katniss tells them about the days before the Games. She does not tell them about the days after.

 

\---

 

Sometimes things are fine. Some days Peeta and Katniss are in love and their children are living in a new world, and that’s enough, no matter the number of graves they play on. It is the anniversary of a day of smoke and screams, and they go out to the meadow to lay primroses from their garden by a headstone. Katniss sits in the sun and watches her children and tells herself she is happy over and over until she believes it. Her heart is quiet enough to believe it.

The next day she finds out she is pregnant again.

A couple days after that, Haymitch gets sick. It lasts much longer this time, and Peeta goes and sleeps at his house for a week. Katniss stays at home and speaks very little. The children are not allowed to see Haymitch, and their father will not tell them why, and they will not ask their mother.

Eventually Haymitch is well again and Peeta comes back home. Katniss still does not speak. Haymitch returns to his geese, pale and with dark bruises under his eyes, but he smiles for the children and tells them stories again. 

“You were sick for a whole week,” the boy points out.

“Well, hopefully I won’t get sick as much anymore,” Haymitch says. 

“Mama’s going to have a baby,” says the girl.

“Yes,” says Haymitch.

\---

 

Haymitch comes over in the evenings sometimes like he did before, but not for “grown-up time.” The children are allowed to run out and say goodnight to him, and after Peeta reads them their bedtime story, they fall asleep to the sound of Peeta and Haymitch talking quietly in the kitchen. There is no clinking of glasses. 

Sometimes there is Katniss’s voice along with theirs. Usually there isn’t. 

One day she gets angry. The children will always remember it, though they will never let their parents know. She screams at Peeta, tears on her cheeks, her hand over her swelling belly, not like she’s protecting it but like she can’t quite believe it’s there.

“You’ve always loved me too much!” she yells. “What am I supposed to do? You’ve always believed more, you’ve always been better at this than me, so don’t act so goddamn surprised—”

Peeta rises quickly from his kitchen chair, to stand eye-to-eye with Katniss. When he speaks it is quiet in volume but sharp in tone. “Not in front of them,” he says. He stares her down, mouth a firm line. “We said never in front of them.”

It brokers no argument, and Katniss doesn’t try. Her posture changes, loses some of its challenge, suddenly uncertain, as her eyes slide over to their children, watching from behind the kitchen doorframe.

Peeta is already hurrying over to them. “Come on. You’re going to go play at Haymitch’s house, okay?” he says, ushering them out. “Everything’s fine, me and Mama just need some time-out time.”

Katniss, left behind in the kitchen watching them go, looks very small and lost.

 

For a while after that, it gets better. It seems to, anyway, and it’s relief enough that nobody points out how forced and fragile it is. 

Haymitch comes over to dinner, and over steak and potatoes the children tell funny stories about the geese, and Katniss laughs, loud and warm. Peeta spends dinner staring at her until she reaches over and covers his hand on the table with her own. The laughter feels fractionally thinner and more fragile as the night goes on but she keeps smiling, smiling, smiling like she’s on Flickerman’s show again and determined to do it right, like she’s waving for an audience.

When dinner is over, she rises from the table. “I’m just going out for a walk,” she says lightly. Haymitch gets up too, and follows her to the door. He catches her elbow to stop her.

“You can have this,” he says quietly. “You changed the rules, you changed the endings. You don’t have to become me.” He squeezes her arm. “You’re allowed to be happy. “

Katniss smiles back wanly. He drops his hand, and she walks out into the night.

\------

It doesn’t last.

Katniss’s loud laughter becomes more and more thin and brittle before going silent, her smiles falter and disappear, her belly grows. The children spend more time with Haymitch, and their mother spends more time by the window with her book. Peeta makes her tea that she doesn’t drink. She grips the cold mugs and turns the pages of the book, goes for walks alone in the woods in the gray morning.

Effie comes into town for the birth, but even her bright laughter cannot fill the hollows that Katniss’s false laughter carved in the walls. She goes nervous and quiet and spends most of her visit talking quietly with Haymitch.

“Taking the fall about Coin might have been a kinder end,” the little girl overhears Haymitch telling Effie. 

“Don’t say that,” Effie says.

“I know, I’m sorry,” he says immediately. “The kids. I wouldn’t wish away...” He sighs. “I think about it sometimes though and god, what kind of sick son of a bitch does that make me. She would have been a hero, though. She would have been proud of herself. I don’t think a moment since then has been any better, Eff. Not really. Not a moment since Prim.” 

By the time she is old enough to understand what he means, by the time she learns about Coin in history class, she has forgotten the conversation.

 

The baby is born. Effie disappears into the room with Katniss, and then Peeta. Haymitch sits on the grass outside and watches the geese and children as they play, away from Katniss’s screams. (She won’t take the Capitol medicine, wouldn’t go to a Capitol hospital, no matter that it’s not the Capitol anymore, no matter how Effie begged. She never has.)

Effie comes out of the house crying and Haymitch stands up, face pale. She musters up a smile though, and shakes her head. 

“They’re both fine,” Effie says, and Haymitch exhales. Effie’s smile goes a little wobbly. “A girl,” she says. “She’s beautiful.” Her voice breaks, and Haymitch wraps an arm around her; she turns her face into his shoulder and cries, and he doesn’t ask why.

 

The baby is crying. Peeta has her on his shoulder and bounces gently, stroking her back with a thumb and murmurs shushes and reassurances. It doesn’t help. 

The children are playing on the floor in the far corner, quieter than children their age should know how to do. They speak in practiced whispers, take up very little space. The baby is hiccupping with sobs but Peeta just pats her back and hums to her.

Katniss sits in her chair by the window. The book sits to her side on the table, next to a half-empty bottle. A news program mutters almost inaudibly about unrest and protests and she looks out the window, chin in her hand, eyes fixed on the middle distance. 

“Katniss?” says Peeta, before he can stop himself, and his quiet voice sounds seventeen again, too young, too lost to be holding his third child. He takes a step closer to her. “Katniss?” he says again.

“Yes?” she answers calmly. She does not turn from the window, but her fingers shift on the empty glass in her hand.

“We’re going to be all right,” he says. “Real or not real?”

Katniss laughs. It’s a low, rough sound, like the laugh has gotten caught in her throat. She reaches for the bottle and pours herself another drink.

“Real,” she says. “Definitely real.”


End file.
